On leaving UserLand products behind

I’ve finally cleaned up the last of my Radio UserLand life. I’ve unsubscribed from all of the websites for their products and the owner’s weblogs. Jake Savin’s long since moved on to Microsoft and Lawrence Lee is the only one steering the ship at this point. I’ve unsubscribed from his weblog because it’s only a shadow of it’s former self.

I’ve stopped using the software and it feels very good. NetNewsWire is good for news aggregating and most of all, it runs well on almost any Mac. This aging G3 iBook will load and use it without complaint. The switch to WordPress was a breeze, but I’m still missing some content from the old days I’d like to have.

The best part about the whole thing has been the utter lack of issues. I write more often because my tools don’t get in the way. For example, in MarsEdit, I have a custom layout for attributed posts set in my prefs. In NetNewsWire, when I selected some of the body text of a post I wanted to quote, NNW only sent the selected part to MarsEdit–exactly what I would have hoped. It’s a silent feature, one that you won’t hear much about, but it shows that the programmer was a craftsman.

Radio UserLand has always been slapdash–hurry up and write it and move on. Now that I’m learning more about software programming, it’s errors are more obvious and more disappointing.

It served me well for years, but I’m glad I finally killed my copy of Radio.

I feel a certain regret to see you phase out of Userland after all your great contributions but understand entirely why. I’d phase out of Userland products too if I had the time to invest in learning a new system, and if I was still spending enough time blogging to justify the investment. My current site is pretty static at this point so Radio is OK for now – though at some point I suppose it will be too unreliable even for my limited needs as it slowly devolves into relicware.